Intel to Support multiple OSes with Haswell, Integrate USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt with Ivy Bridge

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Speaking at Computex in Taiwan, Intel has just unveiled a slew of Sandy and Ivy Bridge advances, and a sneak peek at what’s in store for Ivy Bridge’s successor, Haswell. On the Sandy Bridge front, Intel demonstrated a new “thin” mini-ITX motherboard, along with a fanless all-in-one 95-watt TDP system that probably uses the new motherboard. Ivy Bridge, the successor to Sandy Bridge that’s expected in 2012, will integrate USB 3.0 on the chipset, and provide discrete Thunderbolt support. Ivy Bridge will also support “configurable TDP,” which will increase their allure for use in mobile and fanless applications. Finally, Intel has announced that Haswell — the 2013 successor to Ivy Bridge — will support “multiple OSes.”

With Ivy Bridge and Haswell, Intel’s primary focus has shifted — at least marketing-wise — towards the mobile, fanless form-factor. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are already closing in on 30W TDP, and Haswell should bring Intel into the 10-20W zone. That’s still some way off the less-than-5-watts TDP of Nvidia’s Tegra Kal-El ARM chips, but it’s in the same ballpark. More importantly, though, Haswell will blow away Kal-El and its successors in terms of performance. Back in February, an “equivalent” Core i7 chip was shown to be around 3 times faster than Nvidia’s next generation piece, and there’s no evidence that Nvidia’s 2012 or 2013 products will even begin to close the gap.

And then there’s “multiple OS” support, whatever that might mean. All we have to go on is a fleeting slide at Computex and gut instinct. When AnandTech asked for more information, Intel refused to comment and merely said that Anand had made an “astute observation” and that more information would follow at a later date. When we consider that Intel has given Haswell the rather illustrious subtitle of “The Notebook Re-invented,” we can definitely make some educated guesses about what “multiple OSes” means. It’s obviously not something banal, like the fact that Haswell will run both Windows and Mac OS X — we already know that. It also can’t be a hint that Haswell will run Android — Atom processors can already do that.

Multiple OSes almost certainly indicates that Haswell processors will feature some kind of “dual mode” where two OSes can be run at the same time, on the same hardware. Think of it as hardware support for BlueStacks, which runs Android on top of Windows — but instead of Android communicating through BlueStacks and Windows, it would have a direct line to the processor, and presumably every other hardware resource. At the moment it’s impossible to say how this will be implemented, but it would make sense to split the operating systems by cores, with one operating system on one set of cores, and the other OS on another.

The other option is that Intel might be the verge of announcing support for another mobile OS, like Windows Phone 7 or iOS. It’s unlikely — but entirely possible — that Intel is working with Microsoft on an x86 port of Windows Phone 7. There could even be a link between Haswell and Windows 8, which will run on both ARM and x86 systems. Likewise, Apple, in a move to consolidate iOS and Mac OS X, could be working on an x86 port of iOS.

For the sake of completeness, we should also note that Intel could be working on some kind of ARM translation circuitry that allows the Haswell processor to run ARM operating systems like WP7 and iOS. Intel could also be working on a software abstraction layer, in the same way that the Transmeta Crusoe achieves x86 compatibility, to bring ARM compatibility to Haswell. More efficient designs and reductions in TDP can only give Intel so much leverage over ARM in the mobile space, but the ability to run multiple OSes side-by-side, and the interoperability that would ensue, could definitely mix things up.

Finally, to bring the focus back to the near future, Intel’s announcement that the Ivy Bridge platform will support both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt is huge news. Considering the ubiquity of USB, the inclusion of 3.0 support was never really doubted — but built-in Thunderbolt support is big. Intel is both assuring peripheral partners that Thunderbolt is here to stay, and ensuring the eventual uptake of the new technology by consumers. It is, to put it bluntly, Intel’s way of saying that Thunderbolt will not fade into specialist-use obscurity like FireWire, and that one day we might still use optical fiber Light Peak interconnects.